Service Management: Why Bother Reporting?

By Robert Hall, Support Analyst, Marval

You are the Service Delivery Manager and your role is intended to oversee the delivery of services or service technology to a company's customers. You need to establish policies designed to ensure consistently high service performance, monitor employees and evaluate customer feedback to develop quality improvement processes.

At some stage, you will be asked to demonstrate what a good job you do, to confirm you deliver what is intended, identify areas for Continual Service Improvement (CSI) and demonstrate value for money. That’s where reporting comes in; and a good report bears a lot of value. Furthermore, reporting can facilitate and support your planning, like assigning and scheduling of available resources.

In a more business level, reporting can help you obtain a real understanding of the impact your team makes to the organization. It may be used to define and evaluate priorities, as well as justify changes and accelerate critical business decisions. It will help you reduce your operational costs in many ways, from identifying frequently repeated tasks that can be automated, to improving use of your existing resources and maximizing productivity. And of course, it will help you identify any skill gaps and training needs for your staff.

That’s why to bother reporting!

A tall order maybe? Well, with the help of an advanced ITSM Management Tool such as Marval MSM, you can do just that.

MSM provides easy access to graphical, real-time management dashboards and reporting for all services. The Service Portfolio can be viewed for any or all of the three statuses – Planned, Active or Retired. Useful information is always available to illustrate and confirm to the business what your department is expected to handle on the Service Desk – and how effectively you do it.

You will probably want to review and report on the Incidents (or any other request types in use) by those services, perhaps even put a trend line on a graph to show any breaches (Fix or Response) that occurred during the selected period. That takes care of the ‘show what we do’ reporting.

The figures and graph results can then be reviewed to identify the possible areas for CSI.

Finally, you can ask yourself (and the business) the critical questions: When, What and Where.

- When are the reports required? (most likely to be a Board Meeting or Service Review Meeting).

- What format should they be delivered in? What do they measure?

- Where will the data come from? (that’s’ easy: Marval MSM). Where will the reports be stored?

Agree and refine these report basics over time and you will be able to answer ‘Why Bother Reporting’.